Sunday, November 11, 2018

Introducing apollo



The issue for focus-iOS that I was planning on working on ended up being taken. Because of this, I decided to work on one of my own projects instead. Over the summer, I was working on a personal closed-source project. I didn't get too far with it so I decided that it would be a great opportunity to open source it and see if anyone would want to contribute.

apollo

apollo is a webscraper written in C++ using the cURL library. It scrapes and stores information about upcoming music albums in a local postgreSQL database. The goal of this project is to create an internal database that holds information about artists, recordings, genres, etc. - similar to that of Discoggs but available to anyone. I'm hoping on using this as the backend of an iOS application that I'm planning on writing as a compliment to apollo. That application will act as a calendar for upcoming albums. I'm hoping to create an application that can track releases as well as recommend upcoming releases.

What I Worked On

To start off the project, I had to add the README and make sure that any potential contributors know how build and run apollo. To do this, I included the steps to take to build the project. I left some contribution notes to make some parts of the codebase clearer for new contributors. To make it easier, I made a bash shell script to create a user and database, as well as populate the database with tables needed to run the application.

A lot of the code that I was working on had to be changed because I restructured the database. I realized that the codebase as it was initially would not run properly with the new database so I set out on fixing it. I created an issue to log my progress of restructuring the code base. Fixing everything at once would have taken too long and I didn't want that to put off new contributors so I focued primarily on getting the base of the code to work. With this fix, new contributors will be able to run apollo without any errors and would be free to help contribute to the project.

I also made sure to make some issue that others can take. I'm hoping to get this project to a point where others will want to contribute.

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